Summer in the City

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Category: Clark Park

Bright benches make Detroit brighter

I have been working with Summer in the City throughout the whole summer. Most days the work itself is rewarding, like seeing real progress in building a bench or bonding with a little kid. We don't always get to see, however, what lasting effect our work can have on the city. Those glimpses, while few and far between, are precious.

This last Friday, I was lucky enough to get one such glimpse. That day another leader, Liz, and I painted benches in Clark Park in Mexicantown with a group of volunteers. I was unhappy when we left four hours later. This is unusual; generally, Summer in the City is great at making Detroit look better when we leave. After spending our day painting benches bright colors, though, I wasn't convinced we had done that. Neither us leaders nor our volunteers were professional artists, so painting can be hard to make look nice at times. I was so frustrated.

That evening, however, my boyfriend Jeff and I went back to Mexicantown for dinner and drove past Clark Park. He had heard me talk about Summer in the City all summer but had never seen what we had done, so we stopped and I gave him a tour. I showed him benches we had made out of brick and recycled concrete a few weeks before, the walls we had painted a few weeks later, and then came around to our painted benches. On those same benches - the ones I had thought we hadn't done well enough for our beloved city - looked great. What's more, there were a bunch of families sitting on our rainbow of benches, talking and playing with their kids in the twilight. A few ochre benches, untouched by our brushes, were empty. The families had flocked to our brightly colored benches. Upon closer inspection, our benches really did look great. We had done something, again, that had made Detroit a little brighter.